How To Make The Avatar
by naggeluide
Summary: Disclaimer: THIS IS CRACK. Bakugou did not in fact blow up, unless you counted his snickering as nano-explosions, maybe his snot was nitroglycerin too? "Hey, I bet if Icyhot fucked the lovechild of Captain Air Horn and Earthquake Kitty they could make the Avatar." Oh but this was so much better than explosions.


"Water. Earth. Fire. Air," proclaimed a girl's voice over the tinny laptop speakers.

"It's called bending, instead of Quirks, but powers are purely elemental." Midoriya was giving a voice-over to the voice-over, from his position as the leafy green vegetable filling tucked into an Uraraka-and-Todoroki sandwich on his bed. "You're going to love it, Todoroki, since you're basically a combination water- and fire-bender! I always wanted to be an earthbender, because they're so strong, although airbending is a close second since All Might can actually generate wind blasts with his punches, they're so powerful…"

Shouto was caught in a moral dilemma. Should he listen to Midoriya, to demonstrate that his opinions were valued as much as the more general yet equally valuable sound of his voice, or should he listen to the show, which was a thing that Midoriya loved and therefore was also worthy of Shouto's attention? Was it possible to do both?

"Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked."

Well, that looked and sounded a lot like the childhood Shouto did his best to repress, so he went back to listening exclusively to Midoriya.

"Maybe you can pick up some new moves from the firebenders, everything they do is based in a real-life martial art -"

"Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished."

Wait, _master of all four_ -

Shouto lunged for the laptop and hit the spacebar, pausing the video on an image of a figure simultaneously commanding streams of water, flames, rocks, and air.

"Eh. Todoroki?" Midoriya blinked.

"YOU DO NOT PAUSE MY GIRL KATARA," yelled Uraraka, making a move for the laptop. Shouto quickly threw his body into the remaining space between her and the device, and she howled. "AGNI KAI!"

Shouto had no idea what she meant, but that was a common enough occurrence that he ignored it in favour of more pressing issues. "Midoriya," he started. "Just how much of a cultural phenomenon is this show?"

"Uh, I don't really see what this has to do with -"

"Does Endeavor know about it," Shouto hissed urgently. Normally he wouldn't interrupt his friend, but time might be of the essence here.

Midoriya made a face that Shouto had recently learned could be described in text by typing an uppercase O, a period, and then a lowercase o.

After several seconds of telepathic communication with the green-haired boy, Shouto turned to Uraraka. "Bye," he said, deadpan.

"Wait, what?" she asked, the personification of the cute sparkly-eyed emoji that Shouto secretly wanted to plaster all over his texts to Midoriya. She eventually got shoved off the end of the bed by Midoriya, who was saying the same thing that Shouto had, only using one hundred times more words.

"AGNI KAI!" she shouted again, but at Midoriya this time, as he slowly but inevitably maneuvered her towards the door.

"You're not a firebender! And neither am I!"

"Give me a flamethrower and say that again to my face, I dare you!"

A small scuffle ensued, punctuated by floating action figures and the crackle of green lightning, but Shouto was too busy studying the animation to notice. It couldn't be… but yet… if it was…

Door finally shut on the protesting Uraraka, Shouto flipped to an empty page in one of Midoriya's notebooks and began to draw.

* * *

"No," Izuku protested, watching Todoroki write his name and quirk description in the top left-hand corner of the page. "No no no no noooooo."

He hid one eye behind his hand as Todoroki moved the pen to the opposite corner and started writing another name and quirk. "Don't. Stop. Don't do it."

Izuku screwed his eyes shut and pressed his hands over them for good measure when Todoroki started on the next one. Was it possible to wipe his own memory? How fast could he get Shinsou over here to brainwash him before he saw too much? Izuku let out a low moan and tried to halt his brain in its tracks.

It didn't help. He knew exactly what Todoroki was writing, and what dots those long scratches of the pen were connecting. "Please don't," he begged, uselessly.

The pen kept moving, and it seemed years later that it finally ground to a stop.

"Midoriya."

"Midoriya's not here, he's in denial," answered Izuku.

"Midoriya."

"DENIED."

"Midoriya, look." Two hands, one cold and one hot, were tugging his own from his face. Izuku subtly activated his quirk to keep them in place. Todoroki not-so-subtly activated _his_ quirk to make Izuku flinch away from the sudden sensation of a burning temperature difference, and then froze Izuku's hands together once they left his face.

Izuku opened his eyes to glare at his friend, caught sight of the paper, and turned white enough to match it. "Nooooooo," he wailed, not even noticing when Todoroki melted his ice.

It was too late. The image would be forever branded onto the back of his eyelids. On the right side, the names _Yoarashi Inasa, quirk: Whirlwind_ and _Tsuchikawa Ryuko, quirk: Earth Flow_, and a line connecting them. An even worse line emerging from that line, and a placeholder name underneath: _Yoarashi ?, quirk: ? (Earth and Air)_. A female symbol was placed next to that name.

And on the left side… one name. One quirk.

_Todoroki Shouto, quirk: Half-cold, Half-hot (Ice and Fire)._

A line, pointed right and down, intercepting the placeholder name. A final, cursed line stemming from that one, and a single word: _Avatar_.

_Quirk: Water, Earth, Fire, Air (Master of all four elements)._

Izuku tried to regain his sanity by telling himself that quirks didn't work like that, but the living counterexample was seated next to him.

"Help me fill in the y-axis," asked Todoroki earnestly.

Drawn vertically along the sheet of paper, a timeline.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Izuku announced. Quirk marriages were illegal, for a lot of the same reasons that sex trafficking was illegal, and cloning was illegal, and … it was just messed up, okay? How was he having a casual conversation with his best friend about this?

"Pixie-Bob is thirty-one, and Yoarashi is our age or maybe a bit older. Sixteen or seventeen."

"Todoroki, stop." Izuku tried covering his ears now. It worked about as well as his efforts to forget how to do math.

"Currently Yoarashi is a decent human being who understandably hates Endeavor, but if Endeavor really tried he could find and exploit Yoarashi's weakness in a maximum of three years and threaten him into a Quirk marriage with Pixie-Bob."

Izuku was beginning to wonder whose brain was broken around here.

"It's unlikely that they produce the ideal quirk combination on the first try, so to be generous I'd say about five more years before a dual Earth and Air quirk user is born."

"Don't you see how wrong this is?" Izuku broke in desperately, beginning to consider selling All-For-One to the highest bidder if only it would make Todoroki _stop talking_.

Todoroki just blinked at him. "Yes, but that isn't the point."

"Aizawa-sensei always says he's glad I'm not a villain but I don't think I'm the one he should be worried about," muttered Izuku, earning another strange look from his friend.

"The point is that _Endeavor_ doesn't see how wrong this is, he only sees his precious power and legacy. Anyway, there's about a half-dozen people with known age-acceleration quirks -"

"How do you even _know_ this?" gasped Izuku, horrified. "Oh my God, your dad's an Azula not an Ozai. I hadn't even _considered_ that. Oh, this is bad. Really bad."

He looked across at Todoroki, who was regarding him with his usual blank expression, although the faintest tension about his eyes belied concern for Izuku's wellbeing.

"Doesn't this freak you out?" Izuku pressed. "We're talking about _you_, in a quirk marriage with a person at least twenty years your junior _who doesn't even exist yet_."

Todoroki just shrugged. "Not really," he replied, then flipped to a clean page in the notebook. In quick succession, he sketched out diagrams of words and lines that led to conclusions like _Dabi is Todoroki Touya_, _Yaoyorozu Momo is the latest in a long line of self-made clones_, _Shigaraki Tomura's 'hands' are actually a symbiotic breed of land-adapted starfish which live in an aquarium when not on his body_, and _All-For-One is Midoriya Hisashi_. Izuku's mind whirled, and he felt his eyes attempting to bug out of his face.

"Okay, _wow_," he finally managed, at a loss for words. Midoriya Izuku was _never_ at a loss for words. "Are you panicking, because I'm panicking."

"This is my panicking face," said Todoroki in a perfect monotone, indicating his expressionless demeanor.

Izuku stared at it, trying to pick out the subtle signs of panic, but only coming to the conclusion that it was a good face.

The brief respite allowed his brain's logic centers to re-engage, though, and Izuku took a deep, calming breath. "I don't think we need to worry, _Avatar: the last Airbender_ is an _American_ cultural phenomenon. It wasn't so big over here," Izuku explained, spouting out the results of an Internet deep-dive into the topic that he'd done after he'd first watched the show, concluding: "I wouldn't have known about it if All Might hadn't made a reference and introduced me to the show… wait, what are you writing?"

Izuku had glimpsed Todoroki scrawling something in the corner of a new page, and he swore he could see All Might's name, his own, and his mother's up there with some additional indecipherable annotations. "Nothing," replied Todoroki, flipping back to the original page a little too quickly to be completely innocent. "Go on."

Izuku frowned, but did. "Okay, well, anyway, Endeavor hates All Might and everything associated with him, which by extension means America right? So he probably hasn't heard of the Avatar."

"Hmm, you're right," Todoroki agreed, absentmindedly tapping the pen against the side of his mouth in a very distracting fashion.

In an effort to avoid distraction of that sort, Izuku fished for evidence to support his theory. Exhibit A: Todoroki's strange accent when speaking English. Izuku didn't know a lot about accents in English, but Todoroki's was distinctly non-American, which could be the result of tutors hired from different parts of the world. Exhibit B: Todoroki's lack of knowledge of pop culture, which to this day was heavily influenced by what happened across the Pacific. Exhibit C: The extremely traditional everything about everything Izuku knew about the Todoroki family home, which was admittedly not much. Exhibit D: Izuku admitting defeat to the aforementioned distraction and now searching for a more exothermal avoidance tactic. His eyes fell on the offending page in his notebook.

"Please burn this," Izuku begged, half-hoping his friend would take the liberty of extending that particular mercy to his eyeballs, where the horrifying family tree was forever engrained.

"Okay, fine," Todoroki agreed reluctantly, although at least the pen-tapping stopped. "But only because you asked."

* * *

This was discrimination, pure and simple. Just because Bakugou thought she didn't have any fire powers and therefore couldn't challenge him to an Agni Kai didn't mean she couldn't touch a whole lot of grenades and phosphorous bombs. Let him witness her firepower _then_.

Alternatively…

"Ponytail won't make you a flamethrower, so don't even bother asking," Bakugou growled, emphasizing his statement with a small explosion.

Ochako was nothing if not flexible. "That's fine then," she said sweetly, catching sight of a Caprese salad walking into the common room.

… and she was _definitely_ spending too much time around Bakugou if that was her couple name for Deku and Shouto now.

"I'll just borrow Todoroki's left side," she continued, mostly to annoy Bakugou, which was always a worthy pastime. "Hey Todoroki, come here for a second, I need your hand. And maybe a bit more of your anatomy too." Ochako waggled her eyebrows at him for good measure because he wouldn't understand, but it would make Deku blush and Bakugou blow something up.

Bakugou did not in fact blow up, unless you counted his snickering as nano-explosions, maybe his _snot_ was nitroglycerin too? "Hey, I bet if Icyhot fucked the lovechild of Captain Air Horn and Earthquake Kitty they could make the Avatar."

Oh but this was so much better than explosions.

"That particular methodology has never once occurred to me." Todoroki's bass monotone provided the perfect accompaniment to Deku's wavering treble. "Noooo why would you say that Kacchan… wait, what do you mean by that Todoroki? How else were you planning on… not that _you_ were the one _hypothetically_ planning on that…"

"I am extremely gay," Todoroki answered Deku's non-question while maintaining his usual intense eye contact.

Deku slowly began to resemble a tomato, which was just _too much_, because anyone knew that Caprese salad was only good because the sweetly aromatic basil offset the tart tomatoes and soft mozzarella.

"Aww man, some of us girls hoped that was just a Midoriya thing, not a general thing." Ochako added fuel to the fire, wanting to know which of the two boys would spontaneously combust first. She could swear she smelled smoke…

Unfortunately that was the moment Bakugou chose to do what he did best and explode, effectively demolishing the awkward tension. He was such a sweetheart sometimes, really. Ochako hated that about him.

"Don't tell me you wouldn't consider it, though, just to piss off your dad if the kid would be guaranteed to be a pacifist vegan," Bakugou shouted, grabbing Todoroki's collar and shaking him out of his Deku-induced stupor.

The general philosophy of 'try turning it off and on again' worked, although Todoroki rebooted in Safe Mode and predictably started off on his daddy issues. "Not like sexual orientation would matter to Endeavor," he mumbled, causing Bakugou to pause in shock before falling back on his own default mode of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

"OF COURSE IT MATTERS, HOW DO YOU THINK BABIES ARE MADE, YOU HALF-AND-HALF BASTARD?"

"Artificial insemination?"

…Right. Ochako could have done without her daily reminder that one of her classmates had probably grown up in a test tube. And that was the optimistic version of the theories that were circulating.

"I would consider it," Todoroki answered Bakugou's original query, blithely ignoring the crushing awkward silence with all the social awareness of … well, someone who had probably grown up in a test tube. "But I thought the Avatar was this All-For-One type since he has all the powers?"

"Wait, you haven't even SEEN THE GODDAMNED SHOW?"

"Oh yeah, no, not yet, how about I talk real fast just in case I accidentally say some spoilers," Deku supplied enthusiastically. "We didn't get that far but the antagonist is totally a peace-loving monk who is morally opposed to taking the life of anyone, even someone as bona fide evil as the deuteragonist's abusive father…"

"Avatar Aang is absolutely NOT an All-For-One type, you icy-hot idiot! Respect canon!"

"The only cannons I respect are Yaoyorozu's," intoned Todoroki, not even looking at Ochako as he held up his hand for her to high-five enthusiastically.

Bakugou made a frustrated explosion, then threw back his head and demonstrated why Ochako was convinced that his hero name should be Unpleasant Mic: the 1-A Dorms PA System Antihero. "HEY YOU USELESS FUCKS IT'S AVATAR RE-WATCH TIME GET YOUR SORRY ASSES DOWN HERE."

"It's a self-care weekend, ladies, gentlemen, and other!" Ochako sang out after him, hastily floating pillows she'd laid a claim to out of reach of her arriving classmates.

"And we're watching with subtitles, not the dub, because Mark Hamill voices OG Half-and-half's shitty dad," growled Bakugou, guarding the remote with a death grip and a death glare.

Ochako sighed dreamily as she woman-spreaded on the couch, shoving Deku practically into a blinking Todoroki's lap. "I could listen to Luke Skywalker calling me a useless disappointment all day!" she chirped.

Heterochromatic eyes brightened as basic language comprehension was achieved. "Acceptable," Todoroki agreed.

"ACCEPTABLE? _Avatar: the last Airbende_r is more than fucking acceptable, you two-toned bastard! Now everyone, SHUT UP and watch this goddamned fucking timeless masterpiece!"

* * *

Years later, when Izuku started manifesting a new quick every week and they'd all needed Yet Another AtlA Re-watch to cope with the increasing amount of stress in their lives, Shouto startled awake in a cold sweat. That was somehow different than his habitual state of cold sweat due to his uneven body temperatures.

Because even barring the dangers his own quirks, Izuku had escaped a number of near-death situations that defied probability. Saved only by a sidestep here and a dues ex machina there… the term _luck_ had largely fallen out of the vernacular in an age where there was a quirk for that, but it really did seem to apply. Shouto knew that Izuku had worked under Sir Nighteye for a while, but following the orders of someone who knew the future was a far cry from knowing the future oneself. And none of Izuku's quirks involved foresight.

…Yet. Besides, even if one did, he'd ignore it anyway and go smashing into a future of his own making. No, whatever was keeping Izuku alive would have to be something more malleable…

Shouto dove for the whiteboard stashed underneath his desk, and started listing Izuku's known quirks. Next, he wrote: _Time Manipulation?_ And if that, why not also: _Elemental control? Water? Earth? FIRE? AIR?_

Shouto dropped the marker, buried his face in his hands, and screamed.

_Midoriya Izuku is the time-travelling child of my future illegal Quirk marriage._

Shouto wished he'd never heard of _Avatar: the last Airbender_.

* * *

**A/N:** Caprese salad. TELL ME I'M WRONG.

Also, I'm pretty sure I can't have been the first person to come up with this quadruple-element-quirk horror-show scenario, so if you've heard of any other things like this, link them to me please :)

Shigaraki's actual quirk is secreting a tasty enzyme that keeps the starfish sucking on him… with their stomachs, as starfish do… to stay attached. The starfish are the ones with the real decaying powers lol. #notCanonCompliant #Cursed


End file.
